What Did You Expect When You Named It ____? - TV Tropes What Did You Expect When You Named It ____? You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account Share What Did You Expect When You Named It ____? × YMMV "Ever notice a lot of butlers are named Jeeves ? You know, I think when you name a baby 'Jeeves'... you've pretty much mapped out his future, wouldn't you say? Not much chance he's gonna be a hitman, I think, after that. 'Terribly sorry, sir, but I'm going to have to whack you.'" — Seinfeld , "The Pilot Pt. 2" Some names, frequently taken from historical events, seem to be jinxed. No one wants to ride on a ship (or a space ship ) named "Titanic" or " Hindenburg ". Similarly, anything named "Icarus" is begging for a wing-clipping, and sooner or later, the Goliath is going down hard, probably to a smaller opponent (bonus points if said smaller opponent is named David ).

Likewise, don't compare your defenses to the walls of Jericho — that'll just make 'em go splat like an ant beneath an elephant's foot (with said ant being you, and said elephant's foot being the wrath of God .) It's probably not a good idea to name your vehicle the Doom Buggy , either, especially if you plan on driving your friends around in it. And if you're assigned to name a computer, let alone a supercomputer, "Skynet" is strictly off limits; after all, what good is a computer if all it wants to do is Take Over the World ? No matter its size or intended role, Colossus and Guardian are also bad choices. Note that it has to be the name of something that has already gone down: The original Hindenburg was not an example of this trope (but Titanic arguably was, see the Real Life section below). Due to the nature of this trope, expect spoilers. Examples: open/close all folders Meta Naming any form of flying contraption "Icarus". Who in his right mind calls something after the most famous story of a man killing himself by recklessly misusing a flying device that performs safely when used as intended?

note You should name your flying contraption "Daedalus". That was Icarus' father, whose wings worked as intended, which at least one place has actually done. There seems to be a minor trend in entertainment (particularly sci-fi) where any episode or chapter that is called or refers to "The Great Leap Forward" will involve a major, disastrous incident. Anime and Manga Most of the Neon Genesis Evangelion cast are named after sunken World War II battleships and carriers (poor Asuka gets the dubious distinction of having both of her last names be associated with a terrible fate); is it any surprise that the place is a Dysfunction Junction ? Asuka also compares the door to her room to the "impenetrable wall of Jericho" at one point, and tells Shinji not to try entering while she sleeps. Considering what really happened to Jericho, this implies she either subconsciously wants the wall to be "penetrated" or intentionally gave Shinji an oblique hint to try something ( which he does not ). There was a notable subversion in the second season of Yu-Gi-Oh!

ZEXAL ; two minor antagonists, Umimi and Tobio, competed in a team duel against Yuma and Anna, with Umimi using a monster named "Supercolossal, Unsinkable Superliner Elegant Titanic" and Tobio using one named "Supercolossal Airship Giant Hindenburg". (They lost the duel, but these two monsters actually did their job rather well; if any card failed, it was the Barian Chaos Xyz that Vector gave them.) In Death Note : on the surface, naming your child " Light " doesn't seem to jinx anything. But no mother in her right mind writes her kid's name with the kanji for moon, which has four strokes . Plus, Light Yagami 's name seems to mostly derive from another infamous light-associated character - Lucifer the Light-Bringer . Not to mention his last name is written with the kanji for " night " and " God ". In One Piece , we have Ace of the Spades Pirates. Ace of Spades is known as the death card. Guess who died at the end of Marineford? Comicbooks Watchmen : Adrian's chosen codename "Ozymandias".

Apparently, he wanted to reclaim the name from the elegant ignominy to which Shelley's poem had consigned it. Also, there's the Gordian Knot Lock Company. Fittingly, we see the locks broken several times, but apparently never picked. Icarus of the X-Men , a mutant born with wings. Reverend Stryker cuts his wings off, tricks him into helping kill a busload of his former friends, and then murders him. When Henry Pym got tired of the name "Giant Man", he changed it to "Goliath". Others who took his growth serum, such as Clint Barton and David Foster, took the name Goliath as well. And finally, during Civil War , Foster was killed by a clone of Thor , who was so tiny in comparison... Another Goliath in Marvel was Erik Josten, who formerly called himself Power Man (not this one) and the Smuggler before gaining powers similar to Pym's. Not the best villain, he eventually changed his name to Atlas when he became one of the The Thunderbolts .

(Still not the best name, as anyone who studies Classical Mythology knows, and he's gone downhill since their ruse was exposed.) A common out-of-universe reaction to the '70s storyline wherein Green Arrow's sidekick Speedy was addicted to drugs. As Superdickery put it, "It's like walking in on your ward doing a corpse and going 'Necrophilia Lad! How could you?!" The Avengers were named that way, in-universe, simply by Rule of Cool . A villain commited a human sacrifice during The Gatherers Saga , and Sersi killed him on the spot. All the others were horrified, and the Black Widow asked her if she realized what has she just done. "Of course, Natasha. I was an Avenger !" A Running Gag in Judge Dredd is that the famous people Blocks are named after are often horribly apposite for the particular disaster that befalls them, such as a Mix-and-Match Woman being created in Mary Shelley Block or mind-control parasites infesting Colin Wilson Block. The Purple Man, evil mind-controller and one of Marvel's most sadistic supervillains, is named Zebediah Killgrave.

In an issue of Daredevil , Kirsten wonders aloud if his parents just assumed he'd grow up to be evil. Matt quips back that "We call it the Victor von Doom paradox". Fan Works In Kyon: Big Damn Hero , Kyon names his new learning phone (which was created from a piece of data left behind by Ryoko Asakura) Skynet. Subverted, in that the reason he named it Skynet is because he fully expects it to betray him. Film People seem to find humor in Disaster Movie bombing at the box office. In a similar vein, more than a few critics noted the appropriateness of an Alice Cooper B-movie being entitled Monster Dog. The ship in Sunshine is flying to the Sun with the name Icarus II. As if the name isn't Tempting Fate enough, they still stuck with it after losing the original Icarus. To the humans in Avatar — you named the new moon Pandora ? Really? No one cares if it means "All-Gifted," there's a reason you don't try to open things named after or belonging to Pandora!

To be fair, this choice of appellation could be less Tempting Fate and more of a Meaningful Name after the discovery of what a Death World Pandora was. There are no apparent illusions that it's anything less than a chaotic deathtrap. Rise of the Planet of the Apes : The main primate is named Caesar . He eventually leads the ape rebellion. If you pay attention to the TV in the background during one scene, you'll see news coverage of a NASA launch which is called Icarus (implied to be the ship that crash lands in the beginning of the original movie). Sure enough, just a few scenes later, a newspaper headline can be seen proclaiming that the ship has mysteriously vanished, and we all know what happened to it after that. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes : The original Caesar fits as well, even if the name was given to him by the circus owner who adopted him — the parents named him "Milo".) He would eventually lead the new ape race in their revolt against the human yoke and conquest of the Earth. The original colonists' ship in Forbidden Planet is called the Bellerophon.

In Classical Mythology , Bellerophon was a great hero, yes, and he did tame the Pegasus. However, he also fell victim to hubris , and was punished by being sent crashing down to Earth from his mount, where he died a blinded cripple. Guess what happened to the ship? Hey, we've got a band! We've got one really great song called That Thing You Do! . What should we call ourselves? The Wonders ? Perfect! Lampshaded in that, initially, they call themselves "The One-Ders" (they only have one song, get it?). The MC at their first performance thinks the joke is crap and simplifies it. Further lampshaded when the lead singer quits and Tom Hanks calls them the One-hit Wonders. "Very common tale." The 1967 Doctor Dolittle movie - the one with Rex Harrison - features this exchange: Matt: I told you Flounder was no name for a boat! Dolittle: Nonsense. Flounders have survived for millions of years. Matt: Yes, under the water! A more in-universe example: in one of the Gilligan's Island movies, the group finally manages to get off the island.

At the end of the movie, they all get back together for a reunion cruise, on a boat named the Minnow II. Was anyone surprised by what happened next ? In Mission: Impossible ï¿½ Rogue Nation , the British government tried to create a backup version of MI6 known as The Syndicate . Somehow the Prime Minister was the only person who thought naming your covert counter-terrorism bureau after the word for organized crime was a bad idea, but by the time the project was disbanded it was far too late . Jurassic World has a new genetic hybrid dinosaur made to be the scariest predator named Indominus rex. Given it has " indomitable " right in the name, it's no surprise the thing turns out to be an untameable and deadly maverick. Literature The good airship Hubris in More Information Than You Require . Discussed in Diane Duane 's Star Trek novel My Enemy, My Ally . The Rihannsu (Romulan) belief system places great meaning on names, and it is considered unlucky to name a ship after a virtue, as it is all too likely to take too much of the spirit of that virtue.

Kirk then muses on the unlucky histories of ships named Intrepid, and the Rihannsu renegade he's speaking with explains, "Name a ship for the spirit of fearlessness, and it forgets to fear." (She also thinks it explains why the ship named for the spirit of enterprise is so constantly in the thick of things.) Harry Potter gives us Professor Remus Lupin who is a werewolf — "Remus" being a mythical child raised by wolves (brother to Romulus, founder of Rome), and "Lupin" as described above. In addition, out of the two Roman brothers, guess which one died (killed by his twin, even) when you have to be alive to found a city. He appears aware of this, as he uses "Romulus" as a pseudonym for a radio broadcast late in the series. J. K. Rowling seems very fond of meaningful names . There's also a minor werewolf character named Fenrir Greyback. Fenrir is the wolf-shaped son of Loki in Norse mythology, and Greyback is obvious. On the other hand, Fenrir likes being a werewolf, so it's not impossible he chose the name deliberately.

In the short story Sucker Bait , humanity tries to colonise a lush, though somewhat cold (but rich in biosphere) planet called Troas. The first colonisation expedition died after three years on the planet - and now they prepare to send the next... (although, to be fair, they did file away the records about the first attemp.t) If it's not clear how this qualifies, "Troas" is the region Troy was in — though they did have a valid reason to name it that, as it was in the L5 or "Trojan" Lagrange Point of the binary system. In the Troy Rising series, the alien Rangora are rather baffled by the fact that Earth's first two Battlestations are named after famous, historical defeats — the Troy and the Thermopylae. (Of course, any defeat is a victory for someone else — the Greeks won one of those, and technically lost the other.) But ultimately, the trope is subverted — both battlestations wind up facing scenarios similar to their historical counterparts, but weather them.

In the third book, Tyler Vernon admits that he named the first two stations after those historic defeats because back then, he didn't know if they'd work — his main hope was that, even in defeat, they'd be memorable and serve as an inspirational example to future resistance, similar to how the fall of Troy is believed to have caused the birth of the Roman Empire, and the Battle of Thermopylae catalyzed Greece into an ultimately successful union to oppose the Persian invaders. German novel Azrael has the eponymous experimental drug named after the angel of death. Of course, the book is of the horror genre. Invoked in The Sound and the Fury when the younger Quentin Compson disappears. Her grandmother promptly looks for a suicide note, assuming she followed the lead of her deceased uncle Quentin . The Lost Fleet series gives us the Invincible, a ship name with the highest turnover rate of all. Most see the name as an affront to the ancestors and the living stars. Despite this, the fleet bureaucracy refuses to retire the name and gives it to a new ship as soon as they learn that the previous one has been destroyed.

In Dragon Bones , the protagonist's father had a stallion named "Stygian", which is derived from the river Styx from the Greek underworld. Crossing the river Styx means death. Well, it's not surprising that he's killed by that very horse. Ward decides to let the stallion live, but renames it "Pansy". The horse changes accordingly, and becomes quite patient and gentle. Of course, the fact that Ward (very much unlike his father) treats it kindly, also helps. In the Saturn's Children short story "Bit Rot", the interstellar ship Lanford Hastings suffer an accident that leaves most of the robot crew crazy and with an insatiable need for uncontaminated materials, which mostly means unaffected crewmembers (in other words, a mechanical Zombie Apocalypse ). The ship is named after the developer of the Hastings Cutoff, a 19th century shortcut through Utah, which would be a good name for an exploratory vessel, except the Cutoff is where the Donner Party happened. Author Colin Wilson shot to fame with a treatise on anomie, alienation and the consequent loner syndrome in art and literature called The Outsider .

The theme of the book was one of great art being called into being through solitude, alientation, and being misunderstood by a society unable to accept the presence of genius. He drily noted that the impact of the book caused the formation of at least one association of romantic-minded and alienated young men called "The Outsider Society". He pointed out the logical fallacy involved in this, and speculated as to whether these fans had grasped the essential theme of the book. Live-Action TV The Doctor Who episode " Voyage of The Damned " features a space faring vessel called Titanic that resembles the famed ship. Used for tourist visits to a primitive planet (namely Earth), it was named after a "famous ocean-going Earth vessel." The Doctor comments on how poor a name that is, and isn't too surprised when the ship starts to blow up and "sink." It was an Invoked Trope . The ship was supposed to crash into the planet and go nuclear, as a sort of genocidal insurance fraud... My Cat From Hell : This is basically host / cat trainer Jackson Galaxy's reaction to a Season 6 cat named Darkness.

Darkness' female owner Laura was convinced the cat was demon-possessed and would freak out if he so much as moved toward her. Jackson's argument was that calling the cat Darkness, plus expecting him to act aggressively, wasn't helping anything. As such, one of Jackson's first homework assignments was having them change Darkness' name; they ended up changing it to Jedi. Similarly, one episode has Jackson dealing with a cat that is actually named Spike, but is almost never called that anymore, called "Bastard" instead by the owner because of biting/scratching behavior. One of the first things Jackson does is to nix the "Bastard" because if that's what the owner expects, that's probably what she's going to get. Music There's a musician who calls himself Mighty Casey. You've heard of him, right? ...oh . Newspaper Comics There was a Hï¿½gar the Horrible strip that featured Hagar looking at a ship Unsinkable II and wondering "What happened to the first one?" One FoxTrot strip had Jason submitting an idea to James Cameron for Titantic II about a ship named 'Titanic II', complete with a "They thought it couldn't go wrong again..." narration.

Radio In Cabin Pressure , Martin makes ends meet by running a moving company called Icarus Removals in the time he can spare from being a volunteer pilot . Douglas helpfully Lampshades the implications of a pilot naming a company after Icarus. Roleplay For The Spirit Of Creation : San Francisco: If the bad guys wanted their Dark Messiah to stay nice and subservient, they probably shouldn't have called her Lilith . Tabletop Games Changeling: The Lost says that changelings avoid naming their freeholds after myths, legends, or fairy tales for exactly this reason, because the Wyrd sometimes like to make sure the story repeats itself. Mention is made of " the grave fate that befell New Lyonesse ." Warhammer 40,000 : Space Hulks are gigantic derelict spaceships adrift in the warp where they occasionally smash into other space hulks. When they emerge back to realspace, the people who find them always give them names like Spawn of Damnation , Judgement of Carrion or Monolith of Woe. Though in this case, they name it expecting bad things inside, like sleeping genestealers, very much awake Orks, and/or daemons.

Many, many Space Marines are named after mythological demons, evil gods, and other malevolent spirits,...small wonder that some fell to Chaos. We're looking at you, Erebus . One of the most glaring examples: the planet that has had some of the most apocalyptic wars fought over it in the entire setting happens to be named Armageddon. There are only slightly less planets with foreboding names than made-up ones: Typhon, Settler's Bane, Eldritch, Medusa, Gunpoint, Woe, Murder, Baal, Firestorm, Birmingham ... Kharn the Betrayer ( what a guy! ) is famous for singlehandedly destroying his own Legion as collateral damage during a battle with the Emperor's Children , taking offense at the idea of nobody wanting to fight just because it was a few degrees below zero and these days for hitting every time he swings in close combat (not necessarily an enemy). Of course, when your first name is literally "traitor" (in Arabic, though Kharn is supposedly from what was Germany)... BattleTech has several Humongous Mecha with less than promising names. Most telling is the Walking Tank known as the Goliath.

It's well-armored and heavily armed, but it's also notoriously hard to maneuver and has the unfortunate tendency to carry a lot of ammo in its main body. Also, the vast majority of its weapons are optimized for long range and firing forward. As a result, it's vulnerable to smaller, faster designs that can close inside its range or move outside of its firing angles to find a weak spot, including a shot to the cockpit in its head. Theatre In On a Clear Day You Can See Forever , Daisy is about to board a plane, but has a premonition that it will crash. It turns out that the plane's name, Trelawney, is the same as the eighteenth-century ship whose historically confirmed sinking brought her previous life to an unfortunate end. Video Games In Borderlands , humans are looking for fame and treasures in a legendary vault on a planet named Pandora . Never mind that even before hearing this name most people wouldn't want to spend five minutes on it . In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind , there is an item found early in the game called Scroll of Icarian Flight. It gives you 1000 extra Acrobatics skill, which both allows you to jump very high and absorbs damage from long falls.

The problem? This skill boost only lasts 7 seconds. You won't be able to reach the ground before the scroll wears off. To give you more of a hint, you get the scroll off the dead body of a mage, when he lands in front of you from out of nowhere. If you're quick you can save him by casting a Slowfall spell, but he'll just tell you "I don't want to talk about it" and then walk away. Genre Savvy gamers will use the scroll to leap to the top of a mountain or into a lake. Fallout: New Vegas brings us Camp Forlorn Hope — a front-line NCR military outpost on the edge of being overrun by the Legion. About the only way the camp name could be even more conducive to the loss of battles and morale is if it was 'Camp Certain Death.' Actually, it's even worse. "Forlorn Hope" is a military term coming from the Dutch "Verloren Hoop", "lost hope", referring to the first wave sent into attack who are pretty much doomed to die. Basically, it's "Camp We Have Reserves ". In fact , it apparently used to be called Camp Hope . It got the name after things went to hell.

There is an actual Forlorn Hope Spring in Nevada, and the camp does indeed have a spring running through it. They probably could have picked a nicer name for the spring, though. In Solatorobo , the ship Red infiltrates in the Prologue is named the Hindenburg. Of course, by the end of the Prologue, it's lost to a giant monster that suddenly appears in front of it. When Hawke is tasked to find out what happened to the workers at a mine near Kirkwall in Dragon Age II , s/he mentions to its owner that his first mistake was naming his mine "The Bone Pit." Subverted in that the owner, Hubert, didn't actually name the mine; the locals did, largely due to the area's grisly history. Kid Icarus plays this trope straight... in the non-Japanese title of the series and the overseas title alone. Doesn't stop Pit from getting his wings burnt off twice. Guess fate took a look at that one and said 'eh, close enough'. Chrono Trigger 's Kingdom of Zeal named their generator the Mammon Machine. The original Japanese name was the only-slightly-less-ominous "majinki", or "Demon God Device".

Surprisingly , the planet-eating Eldritch Abomination the generator was getting its energy from ended up destroying Zeal first. Metal Gear Solid 3 gave us an espionage mission set during the Cold War , with a trio of spies code-named "ADAM, EVA, and Snake" assigned to the case. Come on, what's the worst that could happen? It's not like one of them could be a traitor or anything... right? In a subversion, though, Snake is the only completely trustworthy agent of the three. One of the several major ending spoilers of the game is that when a guy who calls himself Snake askes to see ADAM, it doesn't take a genius for a woman to say her name is EVA and see how far it will get her . StarCraft has the Goliath: A potent Mini-Mecha , equipped with AA missiles and machine guns, it can do heavy damage to most targets and is fairly durable. If a few of them are alone and are attacked by numerous smaller units , however, their targeting systems are really bad at prioritization. So a few Zerglings, the game's cheapest units, can bring down an expensive and powerful unit a few times their size. Sound familiar?

In Pokémon Fire Red and Leaf Green , a man in the Sevii islands enlists the help of the player character to find his lost daughter. Her name? Lostelle. Ingress : "Itï¿½s called Niantic. Named after some ship thatï¿½s buried under San Francisco. The NIA names all their projects after shipwrecks. That should have been my first clue." As if it wasn't bad enough to choose to base her design and programming off of the maniacal, human-destroying Mother Brain from the Bad Future , for some reason Balthasar and Lucca of Chrono Cross chose to name the supercomputer in charge of protecting the future and preventing the Day of Lavos from ever happening...FATE.

Once thrown into the past by the Time Crash, she initially continues to follow her programming, ensuring the people of El Nido (descendants of Chronopolis' workers) did not interfere with the Zenan mainland and thus change the future...but then through the Records she sets herself up as a goddess , manipulates and experiments upon the people so as to understand life (and eventually become a new sentient lifeform), and once cut off from the Frozen Flame decides as a goddess she is justified in doing anything to regain its power and carry out her mission . Alien Legacy gives us two colony ships with dubious names: the UNS Tantalus and the UNS Calypso. Tantalus is a figure in Classical Mythology who killed his son and was being a dick to the gods. His punishment was to be put into Tartarus with food and water nearby that would move out of his reach when he tried to take them (hence the word "tantalizing") and a rock suspended over his head. Why anyone would name a ship carrying one of the last representatives of humanity is unclear. For reference, you play The Captain of the Calypso as it arrives to a system already colonized by the Tantalus.

You find only ruins and no trace of the people. Calypso is a character from The Odyssey who forcibly keeps Odysseus on her island for many years. Not much better. On the other hand, another meaning of "calypso" is "to conceal", which is appropriate for a ship that is supposed to carry the last humans away from a race of murdering aliens. Mega Man X3 has Vile and his new powerful Ride Armor, the Goliath. The fight with him in the armor is... not the most difficult thing you'll face . (The subsequent battle with him once he is out of the armor is a bit more challenging, but...) Cave Story has the young witch Misery who, due to being The Dragon to The Doctor , causes plenty of hardships for the player character and the Mimigas on the island. Also her backstory which explains that she was cursed by Ballos and is forced to serve whoever holds the Demon Crown. The Opening Scroll of Golden Axe Warrior tells of a kingdom named Firewood, which, when ultimately betrayed to the Big Bad , "quickly fell and was burned." Isn't firewood supposed to be for felling and burning?

Lampshaded in Diablo III by Bron the Barkeep with regards to naming New Tristram after a city destroyed by demons, undead, and an insane king. See, the problem is they never should have named this place New "Tristram." We wouldn't be getting attacked all the time if we were called, oh, I don't know, New Wellington, would we? Webcomics Parodied in Schlock Mercenary , during a conversation between an AI-controlled, damaged, semi-kamikaze ship and the central computer. The rogue: Any last words? Predictably Damaged V: Make sure you don't skimp on fire extinguishing foam when you build Predictably Damaged VI. Oh and.. [Explodes] Narrator: Humans would pick a new name after five losses. The rogue appreciates humorous irony too much for that. Lampshaded in Two Evil Scientists when Sonic meets Vile: Sonic: Wait a second here, this guy's name is Vile? Mega Man X: Yeah! Sonic: When they named him, were they trying to make a Maverick? Happens in Duke Forecastle, one of Erfworld 's side stories.

The first five paragraphs describe the flagship HMS Superbia commanded by Royal Lord Admiral Hubris Unsinkable setting sail to enemy territory, no one gets to hear about the ship or the admiral again. The succeding flagship gets named HMS Hubris Unsinkable, sharing the same fate, and the one succeding it HMS Hubris Unsinkable II. A lampshade is hung on the trope latter when a character comments that naming a ship HMS Hubris Unsinkable III would be completely out of question. In Solar System , which takes place in the far future, one character is a dog named Strelka... because you do not want to name a space dog "Laika" . She also shoots down another character's suggestion to name a new shuttle "Challenger", reminding him what happened to the original space shuttle Challenger. In Short Packed !, Mr. and Mrs. Bean (no, not that one ) are fundamentalist Christians, and are homophobic. This is much to the disappointment of their lesbian daughter Leslie. Near the end of the comic's run, Leslie's fiancee Robin calls then out on this, naming their daughter Leslie Bean. Apparently, it's a family name.

In the roleplays of White Dark Life , Arthur and Cassandra's youngest son is named Mordred, against the advice of their more Genre Savvy friends. Fast-forward 10 years, and he kidnaps a girl, rapes her repeatedly, and damn near kills his father when he hunts him down to stop him. Thankfully, Mordred cleans up his act after being sent to jail, even befriending the girl he raped when he saves her life... then he becomes extremely overprotective of her and his family, to the point of being fully willing to straight-up MURDER anyone who hurts them in any way ... Luigifan says it best: Luigifan: What did you think you'd get when you named him after the guy who killed King Arthur? A model citizen? Web Originals Used as part of Spoony's spoof of Final Fantasy VIII , where the people of America vote Dr. Insano into the White House . He even lampshades it himself by asking what the hell they expected, voting for a guy who calls himself " Insano ". SF Debris has a running gag about the naming of ships Icarus that highlights this trope.

Due to the lack of colons in their titles, Chuck thought Star Trek: Insurrection and Star Trek: Nemesis were respectively rebelling against and the enemy of Star Trek . But given the fate of the franchise not long afterwards, he finds them appropriate. Noob is a about a MMORPG guild named Noob by its founder. Guess what kind of players its membership ended up consisting of. On Brows Held High , Kyle Kallgren complains about Melancholia on how NASA names a giant planet that will probably destroy Earth with such a negative name. He even suggests alternatives such as " Happy Fun Ball ". During one of Vinesauce streamer Joel's The Sims 3 hacking streams, he named the child of his hideous Pikachu-man "Missingno". The face proceeded to become a stream of polygons that engulfed the entire map. Whateley Universe : With a name like Paine Deth , it was almost inevitable that he would take a Morally Ambiguous Doctorate in Mad Science . Western Animation Futurama had an entire Titanic (1997) pastiche. It took place on a space cruise-liner named "Titanic". The spaceship resembled the original Titanic with added sci-fi bits tacked on.

Naturally enough, by the end of the episode, it's sucked into a black hole. They even christened the ship with the head jar of Leonardo DiCaprio and he didn't warn them. Amusingly, nobody sees anything wrong with the name; after 1,000 years, it's not common knowledge. And when it comes to 20th-Century-born Fry's opinion, he's too much of a dumbass to know any better. Of course, none other than Captain Zapp Brannigan is repeatedly Tempting Fate . Kif Kroker: But that leads us straight through a comet field! Zapp Brannigan: Ah, yes. Comets, the icebergs of the sky. There was also the Land Titanic, the world's largest land vehicle. It sank on 7th Avenue after hitting a mailbox. This took place before the spaceship Titanic, so surely the ones who made the spaceship should have still had suspicions about the name. Mixed with Gone Horribly Right , there was "Project Satan", an attempt to create a super-intelligent (but evil) car. What went wrong? Well, the car was pure evil .

Justified since the whole point of the project was to make the most evil car ever. DuckTales , " The Uncrashable Hindentanic " went for the Double Dog-Dare with an airship named the Hindentanic. In one episode of Family Guy , Peter jumps up shouting "Quick, to the Petercopter!, and immediately crashes a helicopter with his face on the front lawn of his neighbor Joe. A few scenes later, the situation repeats itself with Peter shouting "To the Hindenpeter!" and all we get to see is a zeppelin with Peter's face passing by through the window with exactly the results you would expect. "Joe, I am sooo sorry!" "How can you afford these things?!?" Transformers has an in-universe example: the villain of every series, Megatron, is named after the Transformer equivalent of Judas Iscariot, although it varies from series to series whether it's the name he was created with or if he chose it as a symbol of rebellion against a corrupt government. Either way, it somehow still surprises 'bots when he becomes He Who Fights Monsters and ends up more evil than the villains he started out fighting.

In an episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius , Jimmy creates a robotic salesman named the Willy Loman 3000 to sell chocolate bars. To the surprise of no-one who gets the reference, it turns out to be smarmy and incompetent, only capable of making sales by giving away inventions far more valuable than the candies along with them. Notably averted in The '70s Sunday-Morning cartoon Davey and Goliath. Goliath was Davey's talking dog. (Of course, calling them "Samson and Delilah" would probably have worked too, because the two characters here didn't resemble the Biblical ones in the slightest .) Also completely averted with Goliath from Gargoyles . It's not his real name (his species doesn't use personal names) but is what humans have always called him. Still, being associated with the name doesn't seem to have caused him any more trouble than any other member of the group. He does end up in conflict with a man named David who is smaller than him, though. My Life as a Teenage Robot has some fun with this with Armagedroid.

He was built during an alien invasion to stop Armageddon, but ends up nearly causing it later on (twice) . Real Life After the success of the movie Titanic (1997) , someone tried to build a replica of the famous ship to cater to all the movie fans who wanted to have a romantic ocean cruise on a ship like that. They couldn't find enough investors willing to tempt fate that boldly. Then there's the "original" RMS Titanic. What are the original Titans most famous for? For being roundly defeated and sealed into Tartarus once Zeus and company came along, and if they weren't imprisoned, they got lousy fates like holding up the sky for all eternity, or being chained to a rock with an eagle snacking on 'em for all eternity... or being married to Pandora , who released all evil on the world. The Titanic sort of is an example in another way.

In 1898, a merchant seaman wrote a novel called Futility Or The Wreck Of The Titan , about a giant cruiseliner called the Titan which is meant to be unsinkable, whose passengers include lots of famous and rich people, and on one of whose voyages in its first year of service — yes, across the Atlantic — it hits an iceberg in the middle of the night in April and sinks. And no, there weren't enough lifeboats for the characters in his story either. The Titanic was the second of three ships in the Olympic-class, all of which seem to be jinxed: The first ship, the Olympic, collided with the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Hawke eight months before the Titanic sank. During her lifetime, people on the Olympic actually were fine, it was the four ships that the Olympic hit that were in trouble. At least one of the collisions was on purpose, though; she sank a German U-Boat during World War I . A few weeks after the Titanic sank, crewmen aboard the Olympic tested the collapsable lifeboats on the ship and found that they were all defective. The White Star Line refused to fix the problem, so 54 crewmen mutinied.

There's a story going around that third ship in the Olympic-class was supposed to be named the Giganticnote To those that don't know Greek Mythology that well; the Gigantes were the next generation of gods who were supposed to overthrow Zeus and the Olympians but were soundly trashed with a bit of help from Heracles. However, after the sinking of the ship that (supposedly) even God Himself couldn't sink, the White Star Line reconsidered and named it the Britannic. During World War I , it did service as a hospital ship. It sank in 1916 when it hit a mine off the coast of Greece. This story is false (The Britannic was always supposed to be the Britannic, but "Gigantic" was a meme of the shipbuilders for names of new White Star Line Ships), but interesting anyway. There is no record of the Titanic being called unsinkable until after it sank. Throughout history, several people appeared to think that calling a car "Phaeton" is a good idea... (For those who don't know their Greek Mythology, Phaëton was the son of the Greek god Helios.

He tried to drive his father's sun-chariot, lost control, and had to be shot down by Zeus before he crashed it into the world.) Admittedly, the only case where the unfortunate implication came literally true was the Phaeton carriage popular during The Regency , which was famous for its speed and its ability to get its drivers and random pedestrians killed. The most recent example would be VW's expensive luxury car from 2003. Even though the brand is mostly known for its small economy cars, and the company also owns the Audi brand, which is actually a well known brand for large luxury cars. Unsurprisingly, the whole thing bombed because nobody who could afford one wanted to be seen in a VW. Icarus. It was a bus — not very likely to melt down, but as for the "flying too far" part, bendy bus variants sometimes got nasty skidding (when not driven carefully). Contrary to what one might expect, they still manufacture them. Thankfully, they didn't try their hands in building airplanes . An-22 "Anteus". The Soviet transport plane named (in a fit of black humor?) after the giant who lost his strength when he was lifted from the ground.

Its NATO reporting name is just plain insulting. It's "Cock." Though at least that's something well-known for rising . It doubles as a stealth insult, considering the other kind of "cock" can't exactly fly. One of the scientists working on the design of this plane said the name was chosen because it really did "take its power from the land", since refueling occurs, you know, on land. It couldn't refuel mid-air or on an aircraft carrier because the An-22 was the world's heaviest aircraft until the arrival of the C-5 Galaxy and the larger An-124. An aircraft carrier large enough to handle it would be more strictly termed "an island". Hold on just a second ï¿½ black humour? From Russians‽ I suppose it might be plausible . This is, after all, a nation whose most iconic cigarette brand is still the Belomorkanal, introduced in 1937 to celebrate the achievements of a particularly murderous gulag. Various world navies have named their ships after losing battles or even past ships that have been destroyed (possibly as a way to say "never forget" ).

During World War II , it was also a means of psychological warfare — when the Japanese sank a ship, the US would generally name a replacement after the destroyed ship to keep the Japanese guessing about US repair and refit capacity. US industrial production was such that every single ship lost through 1943 was replaced by a new ship of the same name (plus three or four more besides) by 1945. The sole exceptions were the battleships lost at Pearl Harbor, but that was because battleship names were planned years in advance, all of the battleships on the schedule were already named, battleship names were difficult to change (because they were named after states which would lobby to keep "their" ship} and the US stopped laying down new battleships in favor of more carriers. The US Navy ships named USS Bunker Hill were all named after a battle the US lost. While Bunker Hill was a tactical loss for the Americans but it was the key to a later strategic victory: The Pyrrhic Victory they forced on the British was a major factor in their decision to abandon Boston. And it proved to everyone that Lexington and Concord was not a fluke.

Almost as bad were the Kidd-class destroyers, informally nicknamed the "Dead Admiral class". All four were named for USN admirals killed in action during World War II , and two of them were killed in the same battle. Less odd when you consider that all USN destroyers are named after fallen military personnel , but perhaps slightly moreso when you consider the Kidd destroyers were designed as Anti-Air platforms, and two of four ships are named for Admirals who died in air attacksï¿½note The idea probably was that, if those admirals had more anti-air available at the time of their deaths, they may have lived. A little Irony and Revenge is also no bad thing. Oddly enough, all of the aforementioned USN ships have had long and honorable careers. The UK ship HMS Ark Royal was sunk in WWII; several design flaws were found to have contributed to the loss. This hasn't prevented the UK from naming two other ships the same name since; one was an Invincible class aircraft carrier. Although none of the other Ark Royals were lost in action and the very first one was the English flagship in the victorious battle against the Spanish Armada in 1588.

And while most of the crew got off the World War II Ark Royal unhurt, the previous HMS Invincible, a battlecruiser, had an even more noticeable design flaw and blew up at Jutland with the loss of nearly the entire crew (there were just six survivors). To add another layer to this, Invincible was the flagship of Admiral Hood, and there was an HMS Hood that was obliterated by the Nazi battleship Bismarck. However, in this case, it's a subversion: HMS Hood wasn't named for that particular Admiral Hood. The British Royal Navy has had four ships named Icarus, starting in 1814, and all of them continuing through their careers without serious problems. The fourth Icarus was an I-class destroyer, launched in 1936 and which participated for the duration of the Second World War, sinking four German U-Boats. It was decommissioned in 1946 and torn up for scrap in Scotland. The pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee was named after a German admiral killed in the South Atlantic during a battle in the first year of World War One in which the cruiser squadron he commanded was annihilated.

(The flagship of the victorious British fleet: the battlecruiser HMS Invincible). It came to grief in the battle of the River Plate in the South Atlantic in the first year of World War II . The Imperial German Navy and the Federal German Navy had a total of four ships called Vineta, after a mythical coastal town that famously sank beneath the waves of the Baltic Sea. Almost as ominous as naming a ship

Question: So what if he failed, he tried, didn't he? The Hellenic Air Force Academy was renamed after which mythological character in 1967?
Answer: Icarus